How Good Will Kim Jong-Un be at Being Insane?

There has been a change of leader in North Korea.  Kim Jong-Il has died and apparently been replaced by his son Kim Jong-Un, perhaps.  The South Koreans have moved their armed forces to "It's a New Kind of Crazy" alert and the rest of the world watches with a combination of interest and bewilderment to see what happens next.  The prize for facile statement of the year goes to Hillary Clinton who said she hoped for "a stable and peaceful transition" in North Korea.

Permit me to translate that comment.  "The United States hopes that a starving, disease ridden prison camp of a nation swaps a bloated, self indulgent nutjob for God alone knows what in order to perpetuate one of the most monstrous and tyrannical regimes on the face of the Earth today in a socially acceptable fashion".  Am I the only one who hopes that the leadership of North Korea is decided by a murderous knife fight in the politburo?  Obviously hoping for peace, freedom or the possibility that the North Korean people might not have to supplement their diet with tree bark is just a little too extreme.

So what can we expect from North Korea now that Kim 3.0 is in charge?  Many people will say this is a mystery and as far as specifics go they're right but we can identify a few broad trends.  People like to say that North Korea is difficult to work out or predict but I'm not sure they're right.  What the North Korean leadership wants is simple.  It wants tenure.  It wants to ensure that none of its members wind up getting hauled out of a foxhole by either revolutionaries or US Marines and summarily shot or put on trial and then summarily shot.  To ensure this the leadership has to do two things.  It has to control its own population and it has to persuade the rest of the world not to topple their squalid and brutal regime from the outside.

A large army, secret police, incessant propaganda and murderous ruthlessness have so far managed to take care of the first issue which merely leaves the second.  Here the North Korean leadership have a problem because North Korea is weak.  I'm sure they would like North Korea to be strong but it isn't.  North Korea is a ruined cesspit of a country and will remain so while the current gang of thugs continue to be in charge, and they have no intention of going anywhere.  So what to do?  The answer is simple; if you can't be strong, be crazy.  Ensure that none of your enemies real or imagined can ever be entirely certain that you wouldn't commit suicide simply for the opportunity of inflicting pain on your opponent.  A useful analogy might be someone who periodically swallows poison because he knows it will stop cannibals eating him.  What we have yet to see is how efficiently the new leadership (assuming there is one) can do this.

North Korea isn't actually that difficult to figure out.  The behaviour of its leadership is largely logical (although tempered by unseen struggles for position within their system).  The problem is that people frequently mistake logical for rational when the two have very little in common.  To understand North Korea take as your starting point the fact that its leadership is deeply psychotic and then build a logical structure on that foundation.  If you do that their behaviour becomes a lot more comprehensible.  Whether that helps us deal with them or not is another matter.

Neil the Moderately Easygoing Ghost

There is an apartment complex (well simple really) across the road from the cafe I frequent.  No matter what the day or the weather there is always a ute, truck or van moving stuff in or out.  It can't just be natural wastage, there aren't that many flats in the building.  Obviously something is going on and I'm pretty sure I know what it is.  The apartment block is haunted.  After all there's nothing like the presence of tormented souls from beyond the grave to prompt a high tenant turnover.  Considering the housing shortage in Sydney its difficult to imagine anything else it could be.  Crappy building work or unbearable neighbours wouldn't prompt people to move.  In Sydney unless the roof actually falls in or the neighbours are selling heroin out of your living room then you stay where you are.

So, ghosts huh?  I have never believed in them but the evidence of the moving vans seems pretty incontrovertible.  One normally associates the presence of ghosts with some deep rooted emotional or physical trauma; a particularly grisly murder for example or a shattered love affair or missing the final episode of Glee.  In Sydney its more likely to be because the ghosts can't find anywhere better to move on to either.  Anyway I don't buy the entire haunting the scene of some horrible occurrence in your life.  If I was a ghost I would haunt somewhere I enjoyed (sorry Ash you're going to be stuck with me for a lot longer than you thought).

It's always possible that the ghosts are those gloomy self destructive types who hang around a place they hate simply so they have a reason to be angry.  This is probably the case with poltergeists who tend to make a lot of noise and smash things up.  Come to think of it's possible a couple of my neighbours are poltergeists.

Some people suggest that ghosts hang around because they have some unfinished business to attend to.  I don't think that's particularly likely myself.  For starters we all die with unfinished business (unless we are very, very organised).  Secondly if I were dying with unfinished business my prevailing thought as the darkness took me would probably be something along the lines of  "thank God somebody else has to deal with that now".  I rather suspect that I wouldn't make a particularly good ghost.  There I would be haunting somewhere I enjoyed being in a quiet an unobtrusive manner steadfastly refusing to worry about the things I failed to complete during my lifetime.  The more I think about it, its entirely possible I have been a ghost for the last few years.  I must buy myself a white sheet and some chains.

Not that that has anything to do with my being a ghost.

I Might Visit the Pole of Right Next Door

On the 14th of December, 1958 a team of Soviet explorers became the first people to reach the Southern Pole of Relative Inaccessibility.  When I discovered this information I paused briefly to consider human courage, endurance, determination and most of all; what the hell is a pole of inaccessibility?  Realising that I could not draw another breath without adding this piece of monumental inconsequence to my pool (well, puddle) of knowledge I did a little research.  I now present the fruits of those arduous seconds of investigation for your edification.

A pole of inaccessibility is a spot on the Earth's surface defined essentially by how difficult it is to get there.  That is it is generally as far as possible from any practical starting point.  In the case of the Southern Pole of Relative Inaccessibility this is the spot in Antarctica which is furthest from the Great Southern Ocean thus ensuring that the hapless traveller must traverse the maximum amount of bleak, frozen hellscape in order to get there.  Once you arrive there isn't even a pole, just a bust of Lenin staring towards Moscow.

Poles of inaccessibility are really only of interest to explorers, thrill seekers and others who find the normal world too dull but have inexplicably failed to develop a drug habit.  You know, the sort of people who are prepared to waste a perfectly good life travelling a very long way under conditions of terrible privation in order to get absolutely nowhere and then turn around and come back.  Doing all of this while carrying a bust of Lenin on your back is, apparently, optional.  Frankly I can't help thinking that these explorer types are getting just a little desperate.  Let's face it; all the mountains have been climbed, deserts traversed, continents found, tribes enslaved, jungles conquered (and in many cases, bulldozed).  Is it any wonder that they're resorting to making stuff up?  Pretty soon poles of inaccessibility will lose their edge as well then they'll have to come up with something new.

In a spirit of human compassion I have decided to help by creating a whole new crop of poles for these daredevils to reach.  First up is the Pole of Ranting Tedium.  He lives in my apartment block just up the back.  Risks involved in this expedition include avoiding our surly caretaker, the very real possibility of magpie attack and the likelihood that a twenty two stone Polish ex soldier will beat the crap out of you if you make it to his apartment.  This can be an introductory expedition.  Once you've survived that you can journey to the Pole of Exotic Dancers.  On the way you will encounter such natural phenomena as vomit pools, fields of broken glass and rubbish slides while avoiding the maddened charges of the dreaded steroid addled bouncer.  Once inside you have to run the gauntlet of the police raid (or worse, their Christmas party) to reach your goal.  After this you're ready for the big leagues.  Take a journey to the Poles Apart.  This is where you pick two separate places on the Earth's surface and attempt to travel to both of them simultaneously.  Extra points will be awarded if you manage it while towing a bust of Lenin.

I Have Seen the Future and it is Penguin.

Good news on the penguin front!  You didn't know there was a penguin front?  Well there is and there's good news on it.  Apparently penguins convert salt water to fresh.  Yep what you always thought was a short black and white waste of space is in actual fact a fish powered, over dressed desalination plant.  This is great news for humans and, by extension, penguins.

Access to fresh water is one of the current concerns of various doomsayers who have been predicting the end of the human race pretty much since its beginning.  Despite the source of the warning it has to be admitted that there are areas of the globe that could do with a little more fresh water than they currently possess.  Water itself isn't a problem, the planet is lousy with the stuff.  Unfortunately most of it is of the salty variety and that isn't terribly helpful for supporting life.  At least, not our sort of life, it has to be admitted that fish and, of course, penguins don't seem to have a problem with it.

In fact penguins don't actually convert salt water into fresh however they have a gland (isn't there always a gland?) called the supraorbital gland which is incredibly efficient at filtering the salt out of seawater thus leaving one with perfectly fresh, if slightly penguin flavoured, water.  When I say "one" I mean the penguin, at the moment but all that could change.

Desalination plants are going to become a thing of the past.  Sure they work but they're big, ugly, expensive and they chew a lot of power.  In the future all we're going to have to do is rip the supraorbital gland off a few million penguins, stitch them together and filter seawater through them.  With the money we save not building desalination plants we can pipe this eau de penguin into the parched and generally water deprived sections of the planet for the benefit of all.  We can make a little cash on the side by selling the remainder of the penguin as a stuffed toy for kids.

Now that you have seen the future you will have noticed that while there is an abundance of fresh water there is also a huge pile of penguin corpses blotting out the sun.  This should help with global warming or at least provide a little shade. 

At this point you are probably looking back at my first paragraph and wondering exactly where is the upside I promised for the penguins.  Wonder no longer for the answer is simple.  For this fresh water scheme to work we're going to need a lot of penguins, far more than nature carelessly provided.  The obvious answer is a breeding program.  I envision huge penguin farms spanning the chillier parts of the globe to cater to our endless need for fresh water.  This will be the salvation of the penguin, no animal ever went extinct after we started farming it.  We kill millions of cows and sheep each year and we don't seem to be running out of them.  Of course all these penguins will need feeding so I think we can all agree that our fish stocks are doomed.

It Probably Wouldn't Be a Good Idea to Give Me a Job in Social Engineering

I passed by a cemetary the other day, well I say "by" I mean through.  I have a second job delivering past their use by date body parts to this guy who claims he's a doctor although I suspect he's just doing a modern art installation.  What struck me about the cemetary was how crowded it was.  It was a positive forest of crosses, memorials and headstones, some of which were pretty difficult to shift.  I couldn't help thinking that if all those people were alive today they'd be pretty annoyed at the overcrowding and that's even taking into account the fact that most of them have lost quite a bit of weight in the time they've been there.

In fact the more I think about it the more I suspect we could market death as a weight loss technique.  Can't shake those last few kilos?  A couple of weeks dead and they will literally fall off.  Warning side effects can include lassitude, paralysis, brain death and of course actual death.  Pretty soon Hollywood stars would be lining up for this latest get thin quick method and in a lot of cases it won't affect their acting ability much either.  Then of course it will be all over the gossip magazines and current affairs programs.  There will be interviews with exponents of the diet although, of course, those interviews will be conducted by seance.  Pretty soon everybody who despairs of looking good in their formal dress (I looked dreadful in mine) or their wedding photos will be lining up for a terminal solution to their weight loss problems.

Naturally the wholesale embrace of the Angel Diet (catchy name, no?) would cause a number of serious social problems.  Perhaps the most important of these is "what the hell are we going to do with all these corpses".  My "doctor" client can't take them all.  You think the cemetaries are crowded now?  Its going to be standing room only there in the future, in a manner of speaking of course.  On the plus side social barriers will, perforce, be lowered.  In the future people are going to have to get used to being buried next to people they wouldn't be seen dead with.  Cemetaries are going to be some of the most expensive real estate on the planet.  Which teaches us an important lesson; there's always money in property.  Although the value of actual houses is going to plummet as there are fewer and fewer people left to rent or buy them.

Soon the city will be one sprawling necropolis (I love that word, I'd use it even if I didn't know what it meant) speckled with the occasional house inhabited by some of the few living most of whom will have jobs in the funeral business.  On this day we will all have achieved one of mankinds dearest and longest held dreams; quiet neighbours.

Pass Me the Elephant Gun I Need to Meditate

There was an advertisement the other day for Buddhist meditation techniques.  Apparently these are an ideal way of solving all your problems.  That's great news, somebody should inform the Dalai Lama he doesn't seem to have been having much luck getting his country back from the Chinese by other methods.  Perhaps some Buddhist meditation techniques are what he needs.

It's always struck me as amazing that ineffable wisdom relating to peace, health and happiness tend to originate from those parts of the world most notable for their absence.  Apparently these regions have two major exports, the aforementioned ineffable wisdom and a crowd of desperate refugees prepared to do anything to get away from the homeland of such enlightenment.

On second thoughts I suppose it isn't really that surprising.  If your life was an unremitting hellscape with no possible hope of relief I would suggest that developing a philosophy that helped you cope with it wouldn't be so much an indulgence as an essential survival tool.  After all we in the west had something similar for quite a long time too.  We called it Christianity.  At the time it probably helped a lot of desperate people get through their day.

Nowadays people claim that the church has lost its relevance.  Well of course it has!  The church was created to help people feel better about short, wretched lives full of misery and toil naturally its at a bit of a loss trying to explain Kim Kardashian's divorce (or indeed her entire existence).  Come to think of it I wouldn't bet that Buddhist meditation techniques could help much with that one either.

So, can Buddhist meditation techniques (or any other form of esoteric philosophy or religion) solve your problems.  I would say "yes" for a certain type of person and a certain type of problem.  But if you are that type of person and you have that type of problem then you might as well just go to church.  You'll probably find that they can help you out as well.  Just don't expect either of them to be of much use if you encounter a Kardashian on a rampage.  For that I recommend an elephant gun.

Birthday Greetings# 26

Happy birthday to Manuel Komnenos, Byzantine emperor.  Manuel was the third emperor of the Komnenian dynasty and benefited from the activities of his two predecessors.  His grandfather Alexios had held the disintegrating empire together largely through force of will and his son John built on this foundation to reestablish the empire as a great power.  Unfortunately John died while in the prime of life.  He scratched his hand with a poisoned arrow and despite (or perhaps because of) the best efforts of his doctors he died a few days later.  Before dying John gathered such of his advisers who were to hand and asked them which of his sons should succeed to the imperial purple.  The advisers hemmed and hawed for a bit and pointed out that each of the young men was, of course, a paragon; never seen such a high quality collection of imperial heirs; proud to serve under either one of them; honestly, its a shame there has to be a winner but if I have to, gun to my head, I'd say Manuel seems a little, well, nicer.

With that endorsement ringing in his ears Manuel sent his most trusted servant to Constantinople.  John had been inconsiderate enough to die in the wilds of Cilicia and Manuel was stuck there conducting the funeral rites.  However emperors were crowned in Constantinople and Manuel was well aware that until the diadem was actually on his head he still ran the risk of winding up in a dungeon with his eyes gouged out.  Fortunately the servant did his work well, locking Manuel's brother up in a monastery and by his arguments persuading the government and ecclesiastical hierarchy that Manuel was the best choice.  His strongest argument was the two hundred weight of silver which Manuel had authorised him to hand over to the church authorities to smooth the path.

The result was that when Manuel returned from Cilicia he was acclaimed emperor and nobody had to have anything gouged out at all.  Manuel then settled down to rule his empire.  Manuel is best known for his foreign policy which at first glance seems to have consisted of conquering the same regions over and over again.  Byzantium was kind of stuck in between some of the most intractable problems of the day.  The Seljuk sultan of Rum (a territory that had once been part of the empire) was always looking to extend his authority across the rest of Asia Minor, the Crusader nations were irritating the local Muslims by their sheer presence (and a good deal of remarkably stupid policies) and in the Balkans the Serbs, Hungarians and Croatians were alternately planning to throw off the imperial yoke, conquer imperial territories or just make a thorough nuisance of themselves depending on their circumstances and the opportunities that presented themselves.  To cap this off some idiot declared a Second Crusade and King Roger of Sicily thought this was an excellent opportunity to launch pirate raids on the empire.

Manuel handled all this lot with a fair amount of skill and some success although in doing so he built up troubles for later, less talented emperors to deal with.  He took the war to the Seljuk Turks and recaptured some territory from them (although not as much as he hoped).  He ferried the crusading armies across the Bosporus and gave helpful advice about marching along the coast which was under Byzantine control.  The Germans ignored him, were ambushed by the Turks and wiped out but the French contingent more or less survived.  A series of campaigns recalled the Croatians to their allegiance, persuaded the Serbs to pull their head in and even made the Hungarians at least pretend to be friendly.  The issue with Sicily was a bit more difficult.  Manuel cut a deal with the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad (who was about the only survivor of the German portion of the crusade) and both empires decided to deal with Sicily together.  Things didn't go too well since Conrad had problems at home and Roger persuaded the Hungarians to have another go at Byzantium.  When Roger died Manuel sent an army and a huge amount of gold to capture Apulia but despite early successes the whole scheme collapsed.

Possibly the worst problem that Manuel had, however, was family.  Specifically his cousin Andronicus who was a combination of talent, ruthlessness, treachery, lechery and sheer instability.  As a governor in the Balkans he plotted with the Hungarians to murder Manuel.  Imprisoned, he escaped was recaptured and imprisoned again.  Six years later he escaped again and lived the life of a freebooter.  Somehow he wangled his way back into imperial favour distinguishing himself in wars against the Hungarians.  Made governor of Cilicia he deserted his post to seduce the emperors sister in law.  Not content with this he went on and made the widow of the King of Jerusalem his mistress.  With an infuriated emperor hot on their tails the happy couple fled from court to court finding sanctuary anywhere somebody really wanted to piss off Manuel.  Eventually Manuel captured his mistress and their children and Andronicus appeared at the capital in tears with a chain round his neck to beg forgiveness.  Manuel was not quite that stupid and had him exiled.  Andronicus went but he would be back.

In between sorting out the political problems caused by his relatives and expanding imperial power in the Balkans Manuel naturally got caught up in religious controversy.  This was pretty much demanded of all Byzantine emperors, you couldn't really claim to be ruler unless you had managed to make a bad religious situation worse.  Manuel wanted to reconcile the orthodox faith with the catholic church and the pope.  So far so good, at least in theory everybody wanted that.  However what Manuel really wanted was the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, Byzantium was the true Roman empire and to have two in the world was a little ridiculous.  To square that particular circle Manuel planned to unite both crowns in himself but to do that he had to kiss up to the pope.  That meant doctrinal concessions and his populace (to say nothing of his church) were having none of it.  Things weren't helped by a schism in the catholic church which made it difficult to know which pope to kiss up to.

Towards the end of his life Manuel fought the greatest battle of his reign.  It was the greatest because of its consequences.  Throughout his life Manuel had been on the offensive against the Seljuk Turks with a reasonable degree of success and now he decided to cut out the problem once and for all by marching on the Seljuk capital of Iconium with the largest force he could raise.  Unfortunately he blundered into an ambush and his army was smashed up.  The battle of Myriocephalon was the biggest defeat the empire had suffered for almost a century and it ended Manuel's dreams of reconquering Asia Minor.  There would be more battles with the Turks, victories as well as defeats but never again could Manuel hope to defeat the Seljuks completely.

As his days became obviously numbered Manuel got a little silly, dabbled in astrology and got involved in a couple more religious controversies just for fun.  Eventually he died leaving an eleven year old son as the new emperor.  This emperor, Alexios, was naturally guided by his mother and her favourites which turned out to be rather unpopular.  Fortunately dear old uncle Andronicus was waiting in the wings.

How About My Cynicism? Does Anybody Want to Buy That?

The latest non news to impress itself upon my unwilling brain is the fact that a couple of Australian girls are selling their virginity online.  Family groups are, quite understandably, outraged; it cheapens such traditional methods of virginity loss such as in the backyard of a friend's parents house after one too many bacardi breezers.  Some people still hold out for the wedding night of course because nothing is more likely to produce a memorable night than two inexperienced neophytes fumbling around trying to figure out what goes where.

I suppose I can understand selling virginity.  After all, there appears to be a market which is the prerequisite for selling anything.  I find it less easy to understand why somebody might buy it.  After all you can hardly mount it on a wall with a discreet plaque detailing the circumstances of your acquisition.  I also fail to understand why, when it comes to sex, less experience is considered to be a benefit.  You wouldn't choose a plumber or a heart surgeon on that criterion why a bed partner?
"Good news, we've got the perfect guy to perform Harry's bypass.  Apparently he's never done it before."

One of the girls has apparently received a multi million dollar offer from an American buyer but she has refused.  She says she feels safer conducting the transaction in Australia.  I think that's perfectly understandable, I mean who knows; its entirely possible that the guy trawling the internet looking to pay for the opportunity to deflower teenagers is some sort of weirdo creep.

All this talk about selling highly personal intangibles has started me thinking.  Surely to god there is something I could sell to raise money, not my virginity of course that's long gone (honestly officer it is).  My integrity, intellectual honesty and simple commonsense pretty much went down the drain along with the last two hundred and sixty one blog entries.  I did try selling my soul but the only purchaser was the guy I bought it from in the first place and he was only offering ten cents on the dollar.  I'm not sure even I would want to buy my pride or sense of self worth.  Hmm, this got depressing pretty quickly.  What about more tangible assets?  Lungs; tarry, eyes; crap, kidneys; perhaps before I started drinking five cups of coffee a day, liver; you've got to be kidding.  Suddenly simply purchasing food to keep the catalogue of disasters that is my body going seems like a poor return on investment.  I could sell my paranoia and self pity but I notice most people already seem to have their own.

No, I have nothing worth selling and like all other people in this position I think I will have to accept that my only chance of riches is to become a middleman.  That is I will buy stuff and onsell it to others at a higher price to make a profit.  Fortunately I know where I can pick up a couple of virginities at reasonable prices.

Quick, Peaceful, Memorable. Choose One.

At three o'clock this morning my smoke alarm went off.  Despite being deep in the arms of Morpheus I was proud of my reaction.  Snapping from sleep to wakeful alertness in no more than fifteen minutes I rolled out of bed, seized the smoke alarm, tore it apart, ripped out the battery and went back to sleep.  I thought that was a pretty good reaction time.  When I mentioned it to the guys from the fire brigade they seemed rather impressed as well.

Living, as I do, in an apartment made largely of brick and poor quality concrete I have never thought of my home as being particularly flammable.  Especially as my one concession to a sensible lifestyle is to never smoke in bed.  Then I looked around at the thousands of books which cram my little home and I realise that there are petroleum storage facilities less combustible than my domicile.

I didn't realise that I lived on such a knife edge of danger.  To compensate I have taken urgent steps to upgrade my apathy level.  The measure of my success can be found in my realisation that if I did indeed wake in the middle of the night to find my apartment full of smoke I would probably just go back to bed.  After all if flames engulfed your home how would you prefer to be found?  Lying peacefully in bed or sprawled, hideously charred on the lounge room floor having made an obviously futile attempt to crawl to safety as the flames surrounded you.  Think of your relatives; I'm sure they would prefer to think of you going peacefully in your sleep as opposed to writhing, screaming in pain while bits of you caught fire.

It is terribly important, for the sake of your loved ones, that you arrange the right sort of death.  Giving the impression that your passing was painless is important in this regard.  When your family look down at you you want them to say things like "At least he didn't suffer" rather than "Who's that?"  Apparently it makes the subject a little less dead if they didn't suffer or something.  If you can't arrange painless the next best option is quick.  "At least it was quick," say the bereaved as the paramedics tell them the story of how they had to hose the deceased off five kilometres of motorway.  Perhaps it was; quick and still dead.  Of course quick and painless is the best option of all so if you're going to die try and contrive a high speed collision with a morphine storage facility.

If you do manage a quick and painless death you will encounter the third popular comment for relatives of the departed, "We didn't have a chance to say goodbye".  At this point the corpse can be forgiven for bursting out of the coffin and screaming "What the hell do you people want?  I'm dead already."  I wonder how the relatives would react to that?

Of course if you really want to be remembered then at the first indication of impending death use your remaining moments to squeeze into that leather fetish gear you keep for emergencies (just me?  Really?) even if your only usual contact with leather is a sensible pair of shoes.  This will ensure that your remembrance ceremony is filled with people trying very hard not to remember; and failing.

On balance though perhaps the peaceful death option is best.  All of which is a rather long winded explanation for why I've decided not to replace the battery in my smoke detector.

The Abominable Post Industrial Wasteland Man

Apparently the Russians have found yetis!  This is exciting news for yeti afficionados everywhere although possibly less good news for the yetis themselves.  There is just one minor catch; the phrase "the Russians have found yetis" is slightly inaccurate.  A more literally correct phrase would be, "the Russians have not found yetis".  They have, however, found where yetis live.  Or to be more accurate, where they think yetis live.  A team of scientists (a term I rather suspect should be in inverted commas) have found trees twisted into a shelter in a remote region east of Moscow.  There are a couple of problems with this, for starters most of Russia is a "remote region east of Moscow" and while this does allow the yetis enough room to stretch out without feeling crowded it does make pinning the hairy beggars down a little more difficult.  Secondly there are all sorts of reasons why trees might be twisted into a shelter before we leap for the yeti option.  I rather suspect that this particular example might be indicative of the presence of draft dodgers rather than yetis.

If it is a yeti nest, however a whole new bunch of questions arise.  The first is; what the hell are yetis doing in Russia?  To the best of my ignorance yetis inhabit the snowy peaks of the Himalayas not heavily industrialised chunks of Russia.  I've read Tintin in Tibet, I know where yetis are supposed to be.  It is just possible I suppose that the Chinese occupation of Tibet has produced more refugees than just the Dalai Lama and his cronies.  It doesn't take too much of a stretch of the imagination to envisage tall, hairy mountain things fleeing communist oppression as well, but fleeing to Russia?  Since when did Russia become the place you go to to avoid oppression?

Still, the prospect of a yeti nest in Russia is exciting news for the locals.  There is the possibility of fame, tourist dollars and the increased likelihood of fresh meat on the table.  Properly preserved an adult yeti should be able to sustain an entire Russian family through the Winter.  That's before we get into the profits from tshirt sales.  The population of the more yeti intensive parts of Russia must be rubbing their hands (and licking their lips) at the prospect of good times to come.

Sadly I think they're going to be disappointed.  Despite all the circumstantial evidence in favour of a yeti presence in Russia there is one indisputable fact which convinces me it isn't true.  So far no footage has emerged of Vladimir Putin shooting a yeti.

Here Be Allegories

If you have an adequate map and the name of your destination written down you should be able to make your way there even if you can neither speak nor read the local language.  This has always been my belief and it has never let me down, except once.  On one occasion I was in Moscow, my destination was written down and I had in my hand the finest street map that the combined resources of Intourist (yes, this was in the days of the Soviet Union) could provide.  Unfortunately in an effort to be helpful the map had been printed in English while all the important signs were written in Cyrillic (which I know is an alphabet rather than a language but that didn't help much either) which made correlating the one to the other virtually impossible.  As a result I wound up in a not particularly nice part of Moscow (which in those days was most of it) and almost missed my tour of the Kremlin.

I've always been a bit of a sucker for maps even if some of my favourites have large blank bits marked "here be dragons" on them.  Map making must have been easier back in those days; a collection of houses, one main street, a church and maybe a castle and then just plaster the rest of the page with dragon warnings.  Let's face it nobody is going to sue a mapmaker because they didn't get eaten by a dragon and if a seventy five foot long, flying, fire breathing reptile does tear them limb from limb at least they can't say they weren't warned.  In fact I can't help wondering if the entire "here be dragons" business doesn't stem from laziness or ignorance after all but from a simple desire to avoid lawsuits from bereaved relatives of their customers.  "Here be dragons" probably served as a sort of generic warning.  If you trotted into dragon territory and were beaten to death by a pack of crazed bandits at least the mapmaker could point out that he said the area was dangerous.

Of course its entirely possible that the dragons were merely a euphemism from the start.  It was cheaper and quicker to write "here be dragons" rather than "here be bandits, thieves, wolves, tax collectors, plague carriers, disbanded mercenaries, inhospitable villagers, press gangs, evil cultists and the very real possibility that you will wander helplessly through a hostile landscape until you die of hunger or exposure because you have trusted your life to a rather inferior map".  Compared with that collection the dragons sound positively hospitable.

The only real problem I can see is if somebody actually wanted to find a dragon.  One can imagine St George, armour agleam, sword by side riding hopefully off into the wilderness clutching a brand new map in one mailed fist only to return a couple of months later dejected after a fruitless (and dragonless) search through the wilderness.  One can almost hear the weary cartographer explain;
"Look, its just an allegory all right.  Something, incidentally, you might like to explore yourself.  Slaying a dragon was only meant to be an allegory for your personal struggles against sin.  That's something you can do in your own lounge room.  I can sell you a map of that if you like."

Motivation Is In the Eye of the Beholder

There is a video clip on the internet at the moment telling about a special needs student at a school in America who has wound up as manager of the school's basketball team.  At least two of my friends have posted a link to this video on facebook with appropriate comments about how incredibly inspiring it all is.  Well, if you're a special needs kid with a penchant for basketball I suppose it might be.  Personally I don't find it particularly inspiring but then I'm not crazy about basketball.

If you want to inspire me tell me a story about how an intelligent but fundamentally lazy person unexpectedly wound up incredibly rich through no effort of their own.  On second thoughts, don't unless you think that jealousy is the handmaiden of inspiration.

I actually do believe that jealousy is the handmaiden of inspiration.  For every person who strives to achieve something for the personal satisfaction it gives them or from a genuine desire to benefit the human race countless more do it merely to big note themselves or so they can spit in the eye of their neighbours, relatives or whoever it was who gave them a hard time.  Florence under the Medici was the centre of the renaissance; art, philosophy, education all flourished and this was largely because being a patron of the arts was one of the ways the wealthy of that city measured status.  Going further back the Roman republic was largely built by wealthy, powerful men who measured their prestige by service to the state. 

Further down the pecking order cities throughout the empire (sorry, republic) gained their civic amenities and beautification courtesy of the local wealthy who might not have been able to compete with the senators in Rome but who still wanted to point out that they were large fish in their particular small pond.  One of the reasons why Rome was able to rule such a large area was because with the exception of the army the government didn't actually have to pay for too much.  The lower levels of the administration were staffed by slaves and the higher levels by aristocrats who were not only not paid but were expected to contribute to the cost of their position from their own resources.

So, if you want to motivate your underachieving offspring you can either play them heartwarming videos of special needs basketball managers or you can tell them that somebody they really hate has been boasting about their achievements.  The choice is entirely yours.

Get Your Exoskeleton Today!

Why don't humans have an exoskeleton?  I think I'd look pretty cool with a bone white plating over all of my soft bits.  Exoskeletons are pretty popular with crustaceans but they never really took off with mammals and I'm not entirely sure why.  After all mammals have just as many squishy bits to protect as the average lobster.  As it stands all the vulnerable parts of the human body seem to be on the outside.  By the time anything stuck into us hits bone the damage has already been done.  OK we would lose a certain amount of flexibility but I'm not a particularly good dancer anyway and besides, what else is segmenting for?

I'm sure you can see the advantages.  In sport for example a "bone crunching tackle" would be more than just a commentators verbal flatulence.  Bruises, minor cuts and injuries would become things of the past.  Naturally this wouldn't be good news for the band aid industry but somebody has to make a sacrifice and if that somebody isn't me so much the better.  I rather suspect that it is vested corporate and political interests that have artificially held back evolution to prevent the development of a functioning exoskeleton.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it (unless you think about it a lot in which case it makes no sense at all).  I've already mentioned the band aid issue but what would the cosmetics industry industry do if the only thing they could market was bone bleach?  Clothing manufacturers would be out of a job as well, after all who would want to conceal their gleaming white carapace?  As for governments, well I think the threat to them is pretty obvious.  No matter how liberal a government is, how honest or how bound by the rule of law or how much genuine support they receive from the governed every government ultimately stands or falls by its ability to get people in uniform to beat up the recalcitrant.  This would be a lot harder if the recalcitrants were effectively wearing body armour.

Still I doubt if these evolutionary reactionaries will be able to hold us back for ever.  The benefits are just too obvious; protection, simplicity and a built in Halloween costume just to name the only ones I can think of.  Naturally there are drawbacks as well.  For starters we would have to bathe in what is likely to be the all body equivalent of toothpaste.  It's not going to be a good time for anybody who doesn't like the smell of mint.

Defending Scoundrels Beats Brain Surgery With a Club

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of ones time defending scoundrels"  That's a favourite quote of mine from HL Mencken.  Another slightly less pithy quote comes from the movie The People Versus Larry Flint.  Whether Flint ever actually said the words the movie put into his mouth I don't know but they are worth repeating, "I'm a smut peddler.  I'm the lowest of the low.  If the law protects me, it will protect you."

Of course defending scoundrels can be fun if only to see the horrified looks on the faces of your friends and relatives.  Unfortunately it also tends to get disapproval manifested in every form from polite muttering to death threats from those people who think that scoundrels should be forced to shut up.  I firmly believe that scoundrels should shut up.  I equally firmly believe they shouldn't be forced to shut up.  For starters, in the opinion of some I would be a scoundrel and so would everyone else.

It would be easier, perhaps, if we had rights but we don't despite the bleating of various people to the contrary.  You may think you have freedom of speech but I invite you to test that by shouting the word "gun" when President Obama comes to visit.  What most people describe as rights could be better defined as "concepts" or "hopes" sometimes enshrined in law or tradition, sometimes not.  Whatever they are they are not immutable, they can be taken away with the stroke of a legislators pen or a simple change of mind.  There is nothing solid about our "rights".  In a way this is good.  If something is solid it is definable and if it is definable it has borders and if it has borders those borders can be moved.  Just ask Poland.

One of the major problems with our rights is that they rarely have disinterested defenders.  Most people claiming to fight for the rights of others are actually fighting for a highly specific set of rights for a highly specific set of others.  This is not to say the fight is unjustified but don't try exercising any rights of your own that might get in their way.  And those who are genuinely disinterested defenders of peoples rights tend to wind up defending scoundrels as I mentioned at the top of this entry.  This is unlikely to help their credibility when they go up against people advocating the interests of the less obviously obnoxious.

Most people look to the law to protect their rights but laws are actually a rather poor tool to use.  Since they usually have to apply to everyone in all circumstances using the law to protect an individuals rights is rather like performing brain surgery with a club.  If you go at it long enough you will get the affected area and you may even do some good but the collateral damage is likely to be severe.  Probably the wisest thing we can do is keep the law out of it as much as possible and rely on the basic good will and commonsense of the people.  After all, we're the ones who came up with the concept of rights in the first place.

This would work brilliantly if it wasn't for all the scoundrels out there.  I wish there was some way we could force them to shut up.

Outside for Sports, Living Room for Lazy

I was talking with a friend about a party she went to recently.  At some point, late in the evening after much alcohol had been consumed the nintendo wii was broken out and exercise and sport attempted.  My friend was pleased that she was sober enough to recognise this as a bad idea and doubly pleased that the party wasn't at her house and thus she was not responsible for cleaning up the inevitable messy consequences.

On a broader scale I have to wonder about things like wii sports.  Here's an idea!  If you want to play sport then go outside and play some fucking sport.  We seem to spend half our time thinking of ways to reduce the amount of physical exercise we do and the other half coming up with ever more sophisticated ways of replacing that exercise.  We could have saved ourselves a lot of time by not doing either and we would be at least as fit and healthy as we are now.

Not that I am in any way an advocate of physical exercise.  I'm doing a bit myself now and I've got to say it absolutely sucks.  However I do find it amusing that in the poorer parts of the world where eating is frugal and physical exertion is a way of life the inhabitants have no higher goal than to one day live a life which involves being fat and lazy while in the parts of the world where this has been achieved two of the biggest money making endeavours are the diet and exercise industries.  As a species we seem to be rather difficult to please.  Actually that's not strictly true; we're very easy to please its just that its difficult to please us for very long.

Rather than being a flaw in our collective personality this dissatisfaction with the status quo is a good thing.  The principal driving force behind achievement is not so much to get to a destination as it is to get away from here.  Would fire have been invented if everybody had decided that raw meat and chilly caves were good enough for them?  I doubt it.  Thousands of years of human achievement can be traced back to somebody looking around at the way things are and saying; "I'm sick to death of this".  Hopefully one day soon we'll be sick to death of wii.

Strangers, Dogs, Relatives In That Order

I was sitting outside the cafe the other day, basking in the morning sun when a small dog trotted by.  Naturally I said hello, passed the time of day and otherwise exercised my somewhat rusty social skills.  It didn't occur to me until afterwards that I hadn't so much as exchanged a glance with the two humans accompanying the dog.  I've often wondered why "companion animals" are so popular with the elderly, now I suspect its because it allows them to have conversations where they won't be interrupted and all they have to provide in return is food.

I do sometimes wonder how the conversation goes when somebody is presented with a companion animal for the first time.
"Hello irritating old person.  I think we both agree that no human will want to talk to you but here's a dog with a pretty high tolerance level."
The other question, of course, is how is the job sold to the dog.  I suspect its something like this.
"Look, I know its a pain but lets face it he's only going to last a few years and then we'll find you a family with a couple of kids and a big backyard, promise."

A home with a companion animal must be dreadful; the howling, the shedding, the smell, the urinating on the furniture; honestly I don't understand how the animals can take it.  And that's before you get onto the topic of daytime television.  Which brings me to my brilliant suggestion; let's replace companion animals with companion people.

I don't mean nurses or carers or any of the other people who have rather foolishly decided to make a career out of putting up with others I mean dedicated companion people.  We could import them from dreadfully poor parts of the world and provide them to the elderly as companions.  I realise there is already an industry which caters to this need but lets face it not everybody fleeing poverty in Moldova wants to marry their sponsor.  My solution is much more civilised.  They come on a working visa, hang around somebody near to death for a few years and go home with a nice nest egg at the end of it.  Consider it au pair for the elderly.

Some people might be horrified at the thought of outsourcing caring for the elderly (or, more accurately, pretending to care for the elderly) to complete strangers from another country but is that any worse than getting dogs to do it?  There is a benefit for old people as well.  No matter how much they annoy you it is very difficult to get your relatives deported.

If You Can't Grow Opium Tattoo Elephants Instead

My previous blog entry got me thinking.  This does happen occasionally and usually at inconvenient times.  Either that or the subject of my ruminations bears absolutely no connection to the subject currently under discussion.  This can be embarrassing, particularly at work.
"What's your opinion Neil?" my supervisor will ask leaving me in the awkward position of either making something up or having to admit that I was using work time to try and come up with a method for fitting elephants with false tusks so that poachers don't have to kill them to get the ivory.

Of course the previous example is ridiculous and fanciful.  My supervisor never asks for my opinion.  Nevertheless it serves to emphasize my point which is that with a little creativity we can often exploit our natural resources without having to deplete them too much.  Not all the time of course, no amount of creativity is going to result in us coming up with a way of extracting seafood from the ocean that doesn't result in a bunch of dead fish, but sometimes.  I think the common term is sustainability although I prefer pachyderm othordonty.  I can't think of a better form of employment for most environmentalists than running around darkest Africa trying to stick false teeth on elephants.

Once the false tusks are in place we can move on to elephant body piercing and elephant tattooing.  Pretty soon we're going to have some of the wildest looking elephants imaginable.  People come to Africa to see the animals now, wait until they see the new improved versions.  Once the elephants are sorted we can extend this to other animals and pretty soon the poachers are going to be driven out of business as all the locals get better jobs in the animal body art industry.

This is the way to beat poachers of course, ultimately the local population don't get jobs as poachers out of some visceral hatred for the elephant community.  They do it to put food on the table.  Employment opportunities in the African savannah aren't so plentiful that the inhabitants can afford to pass up a lucrative career whacking elephants in the hope that something better comes along.  Normally the impoverished citizens of desperately poor parts of the globe can at least rely on growing some illicit narcotic to keep the wolf (or lion or crocodile) from the door but with sub saharan Africa its elephants or its nothing.  At least until one of our major banks outsources its data security services to the Central African Republic.  Which to be fair will probably happen any day now.

Without Any Trains the Rail Network Will be Much Easier to Run

It is a hot, humid and generally disgusting day.  Simply walking outside results in damp clothes clinging to your body which is a lot less fun when you actually have to be somewhere.  People familiar with Sydney's public transport network will know what that means; it's trackwork day!  On a day like today the rail authority (or whatever they call themselves now) shuts down part of the railway network to do maintenance.  Usually they manage to shut down whatever part of it I need to use.  None of which would bother me (well, not too much) if I could see any improvement in the rail service after they had finished but apparently this is the amount of work necessary to simply maintain the rail network in its current state of inadequacy.

It is rather unfair of me to complain about our rail network.  It was designed and built rather well.  Unfortunately most of it was designed and built rather well about eighty years ago.  It is a tribute to the skill and far sight of its creators that it functions as well as it does.  And it does function well.  Despite all of the disparaging comments (many of them by me) large metal cylinders trundle down the tracks periodically stopping to pick up and drop off their human cargo generally at least within shouting distance of the timetable.

Where the rail network falls down is in capacity and extent.  Or to put it another way the city has grown to the point where we are starting to exceed the capacity for prophecy shown by the engineers and builders eighty years ago.  So what to do?  Of course the ideal solution would be to build extensions and upgrades to the network so that its good for another eighty years or so.  However in the unlikely event that our states political leaders turn out to be a bunch of feckless, irresponsible, short termist, pathetically incompetent halfwits it is probably a good idea to have a contingency plan standing by.

And here it is!  Let's get rid of public transport entirely.  Think about it; what do people use public transport for?  Three things mainly; to get to work, to visit friends and relatives and to go shopping.  All of these things can now be done over the internet so there seems no real reason to have public transport at all.  In fact there seems to be very little reason to have private transport either.  When the roads are clear of all except emergency vehicles and we're all living a troglodyte existence within our homes the world will be cleaner, safer and much more peaceful.  Best of all we will have the perfect excuse not to visit those irritating relatives we can't stand.

Important Birds and Trivial Otters

Thirty two miles outside of Newcastle is a city (this is the term it uses for itself) called Cessnock.  Cessnock is the gateway to the Hunter Valley wine district and it probably can't help the fact that the gateway is covered in coal dust.  There are many reasons to travel to Cessnock, for starters if you begin your journey in Newcastle there is the knowledge that at the end of your trip you're thirty two miles away from Newcastle.  Which is a start.  Other than that Cessnock is famous for being the home town (oh all right, city) of an Australian professional darts player.  Oh yes, and Cessnock is slap bang in the middle of the Hunter Valley Important Bird Area.

How does a bird go about getting the "important" label beside its name?  Do they have to take a test?  Is there counselling available for those birds who don't make the cut and have to go through life with the stigma of being officially unimportant?  How do the important birds keep their lesser cousins out of their area?  Are there gates?  Security teams checking IDs perhaps?
"Excuse me sir, but are you an Important Bird?  You're not?  I'm very sorry sir but you can't come in here.  Try the Hunter Valley Utterly Trivial Bird Area just down the road.  Not at all sir, a lot of people make that mistake.  Have a nice day."
And so another socially ambitious bird is crushed and slinks off to join its insignificant fellows.

Of course I'm being silly (What? Never, I don't hear you cry) the importance refers not to the birds but to the area.  Apparently the area is important to birds or its important that birds be there or something.  Since mankind has spent the last century alternately digging huge holes in the Hunter Valley and planting stuff in it the importance might derive from the fact that there are still birds there at all.  Or any other native life bigger than a mosquito.  Yet apparently birds are there, sheltering under vineyards, picking over slag heaps and nesting in the few remaining trees.  Talk about not taking a hint.  Among them is the near threatened Diamond Firetail.  Near threatened is a status that seems a little problematic to me.  Threatened; yes fine, no problem there.  Common as muck; also fine, but near threatened?  To me it brings to mind an ordinary bird standing beside a rarer relative in the hopes of getting some grant money.  Come to think of it since Cessnock is in the important bird area and thus near the Diamond Firetail does that make Cessnock near near threatened?  Possibly a better description would be "almost threatened" or perhaps "not actually threatened at this moment but I wouldn't advise selling it life insurance".

Something else that qualifies as near threatened is the European Otter despite the fact that it pops up everywhere from Ireland to Korea.  It is extinct in Liechtenstein, however since the otter population of Liechtenstein was probably only about two to begin with its entirely possible they're just on a long holiday.  They're quite common in Britain (less so in Korea, possibly dietary differences have something to do with it) or at least they are now.  A couple of decades ago you would have been hard pressed finding any otters in Britain but since that time people have been persuaded to stop dumping pesticides into the water supply and now otters are so numerous that they have to hose them off the runways at Heathrow so planes can land.  As yet, however, I have not heard of any part of Britain (much less Korea) being designated an Important Otter Area.

Look, Down On the Ground! It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's a Russian Airliner

Interesting news on the aviation front.  Russia's skies are officially the deadliest in the world.  Honest citizens can't leave their homes without being subjected to a steady rain of aeroplane parts as representatives of Russia's ageing airlines give up the struggle with gravity.  Russia's air safety record is apparently worse than that of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Excuse me?  The DRC isn't even a country, its a bloodbath with borders, yet somehow it does a better job of persuading aeroplanes to stay in the sky than Russia does.  Perhaps the Russians should cancel their space program and concentrate on an atmosphere program.  They will know they're successful when they can safely put a man on the ground near the arrival gates of another airport.  That's one small step for man, one giant leap for travel insurance.

Various reasons are suggested for this.  Certain officials point to incompetent, vodka sodden pilots.  Pilots, perhaps understandably, point out that the aircraft they are using are from the tail end of the Soviet Union and thus combine Soviet manufacturing standards with a thoroughly capitalist mindset when it comes to spending money on repairs and replacements.  As to which of the above opinions is correct I couldn't say but President Medvedev has promised to replace all the old Russian airliners within a year.  He hasn't made the same committment about the pilots.  One suspects that this might indicate where at least a majority of the problems lie.

But back to the Congo.  Let me give you an example of how dreadful a place the Democratic Republic of the Congo is to live in.  Since independence Congo's principle way of changing presidents has been for the incumbent to be murdered by his successor.  The current president has won two of the most thoroughly rigged elections in voting history and unleashed his private army on his only serious rival.  The economy is a shambles, the average life expectancy is shorter than the amount of holidays I have saved and the country was once invaded by Angola.  Now what makes the Democratic Republic of the Congo so bad is that the preceding isn't a description of it.  It's a description of the neighbouring Republic of Congo which is where people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo flee to in the hopes of leading a better life.  There are parts of the moon less hostile to human life than the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Yet now at least the population can raise their heads and gaze with pity upon Russian air travellers.  A country famous largely for exporting blood diamonds and changing its name more frequently than its government finally has something to be proud of.  Across the vast, blood spattered landscape the surviving population stands tall (briefly then ducks again to avoid being caught in a crossfire) throws out what would be their chests if they got enough to eat and strides proudly to the airport safe in the knowledge that there are worse places in the world to be an airline passenger than there.  Once they get to the airport of course they just turn around and go home because, let's face it, if they could afford an airline ticket they wouldn't still be in the country

The Horse Whipping, Gambling Facilitating Fashion Parade that Stops the Nation

Today was Melbourne Cup day.  You know; "the race that stops a nation", "the jewel in the crown of Australia's racing calendar" and all the other hyperbole that goes to elevate a horse race to an experience akin to the second coming of Christ with the chance to win a little money on the side.  The cup was duly run and, as usual, was won by a horse so no surprises there.

Horse racing has always seemed a little creepy to me.  Essentially it consists of getting a group of wizened midgets in clown outfits to gallop horses around a track while periodically hitting them with whips.  If I were to attempt to describe it the best I could come up with is to liken it to a reenactment of the campaigns of Genghis Khan performed by Oompa Loompas.  I'm also not sure what the horse gets out of it.  Well actually I know exactly what the horse gets out of it.  At the end of each race the irritating munchkin stops hitting it and gets off its back.  There is also the possibility that if the horse wins enough races its retirement package will include the words "stud farm" rather than "glue factory" although whether this is explained to the horses at the beginning is something I couldn't tell you.

But as everybody knows it isn't all about the racing.  Of course not!  In fact almost none it is about the racing.  Millions of dollars are spent, horses bred, trainers hired, jockeys let out of school early and vet bills paid essentially for a sideshow.  Horse racing isn't about racing horses, its about gambling.  As long as the gambling takes place whether the horses turn up or not is largely immaterial.  You can bet on almost anything nowadays; football, boxing, elections, cock fighting, Italian government bonds so why is horse racing so special?  The answer is tradition, what else?

Horse racing is one of the most venerable and widely spread methods by which a small group of people remove money from a larger and stupider group of people.  Its been going on for so long it would be almost heresy to stop now.  The queen for instance loves horse racing.  Why doesn't she love poker machines?  Its essentially the same thing.  Well when poker machines have been around for another seven centuries she probably will love them.  It would be only appropriate.

As the racing industry has matured (or at least aged) over the centuries other industries have taken an interest as well and I'm not just talking about organised crime here.  It truly isn't just about the racing any more.  There is also the fashion.  After all when large amounts of money are being spent to no good purpose can the fashion industry be far away?  Essentially I think what happened was that women noticed that men were blowing about half their life savings on horse races and thought "bugger this, I'm going to use what's left to buy a dress".

Nowadays everybody seems to dress up for the races.  Melbourne has the perfect weather for this.  While warm and calm often enough to invite the purchase of flimsy, decorative pieces of fabric it has this tendency to produce cold, rainy and viciously windy days at inappropriate moments.  One of the most enjoyable things about the Melbourne Cup is the likelihood of seeing fashionably dressed women clutching desperately at a ridiculous looking hat with one hand while their dress, which cost thousands and has less material than the average tissue, is blown sidewards by an Antarctic gale.  At the same time they are drinking champagne and attempting to smile for the cameras while dying of hypothermia.  I find this almost as amusing as the animal beating.  One thing I refuse to understand is fascinators.  Many women wear them instead of proper hats.  The only thing I find fascinating about them is that women pay a fortune to wear something that makes it look like someone has sneezed on their heads.

Despite all of my diatribes I watched the race at work.  Its fun seeing the reluctant horses (ie the smart ones) being shoved into the gates.  And then they're off and some idiot is gabbling away at a hundred miles an hour while about a score of horses (with jockeys in tow) charge for the winning post with a determination that only the desire for a rub down, bag of oats and the opportunity to get rid of this idiot with the whip can explain.  As they round the final bend though the sound of the horses coming is one of the most stirring I've ever heard.  This year was awesome; a photo finish with the two leaders straining every muscle and every ounce of determination to get across the line.  There was literally nothing in it, just one head raised and extended a trifle more than the other.  It was amazing and even the fact that my money was on the horse that came second didn't still the excitement.  OK, there is a reason why people in this day and age are still prepared to tolerate horse racing.  At least its over now until next November.

Must Look Good in Purple

Help Wanted!  A position has become available in our organisation for titular ruler of a disintegrating empire.  The successful applicant will be young, malleable, easy going and capable of taking instruction with a relaxed attitude to the hideous murder of friends, advisers and relatives.  Duties would involve; sitting on a throne, posing for coins and doing what you're told.  Pay and conditions negotiable, would suit unambitious adolescent with a death wish.  Apply to Orestes c/- What's Left of the Roman Army, Ravenna.

With a job description like that is it any wonder that Orestes had trouble finding applicants?  Eventually he had to dump the job on his fourteen year old son Romulus Augustulus thus laying himself open to charges of nepotism, breach of child labour laws and really hating his offspring.  One does tend to think of empires as being handed down from father to son but by the last half of the fifth century AD the western Roman Empire tended to be passed down to the person who murdered his predecessor.  Orestes was never emperor, Romulus' predecessor was a character named Julius Nepos whom nobody seems to have liked very much.  He had been appointed by the eastern emperor Zeno to get a grip on the rapidly disintegrating western empire but all he seems to have done is annoy everyone.

Possibly the silliest thing Nepos did was appoint Orestes as his magister militum (essentially commander in chief) thus proving that whatever talents he did possess judgement of subordinates was not among them.  With the ink barely dry on his appointment Orestes marched the Roman army, by now reduced to a pack of undisciplined, untrustworthy and (ominously for Orestes) largely unpaid barbarian mercenaries, on Ravenna the imperial capital.  Nepos stood not upon the order of his going but hightailed it across the Adriatic like a bat out of hell and wailed for Zeno to restore him.  Since Zeno was currently fleeing across Anatolia as a result of his own usurpation issues he wasn't much help and Orestes settled down to rule Italy crowning his young son as emperor into the bargain.

Almost immediately a problem arose; die cutters complained that the new emperor's name was too long to fit on the coins.  Sadly (for him at any rate) this would prove to be the least of Romulus' problems.  Remember those unpaid soldiers I mentioned about half a paragraph ago?  They wanted paying which is why Romulus wanted coins.  Unfortunately the soldiers didn't want coins they wanted land which has the advantage of not falling through a hole in your pocket.  More specifically they wanted half the land in Italy which was just about everything the empire had left.
Orestes said, "No"
They said, "We'll take it anyway"
Orestes said, "You and whose army?"
They said, "Yours".

From amongst their number they chose one of their senior officers named Odoacer and he led them in an uprising.  The last Roman army essentially became just the latest group of barbarians to rampage through the empire and after a bloody struggle Orestes was killed and Odoacer and his forces arrived at Ravenna.  Much to the surprise of everyone Odoacer didn't kill Romulus, he simply forced him to resign and pensioned him off.  Thus the Roman Empire in the west ended not with a bang but an adolescent whimper.  At the time very few people noticed.

Odoacer sent the imperial regalia to the eastern capital Constantinople with the comment that there was no longer a need for an emperor in the west.  One emperor was enough and he would rule Italy in that emperor's name.  Despite the protests of Julius Nepos, still whingeing from the wings, Zeno (who had managed to deal with his usurper somewhat more efficiently - murder was involved) appeared to accept the situation.  A few years later he persuaded Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths to invade Italy, kill Odoacer and rule the area instead.  It is uncertain why he thought this might be an improvement.

This Burning House is Tax Deductible

In 1689 Habsburg general Enea Silvio Piccolomini burnt down the city of Skopje as an anti cholera measure.  Piccolomini himself died shortly afterwards of (you guessed it) cholera.  As a public health measure the burning of Skopje must be counted as a bit of a failure.

Obviously in the late seventeenth century preventative medicine was in its infancy.  Nowadays when cholera ravages an area we respond by airing television advertisements for Oxfam.  This is about as useful as Piccolomini's approach but results in fewer burnt houses (unless the people from Oxfam get really pissed off).

Sometimes I wonder what might happen if charities and other NGOs armed themselves and started getting a little more assertive about their role.  Once an area of need was identified it would be all systems go.  The Salvation Army would be the first in of course to crush any resistance and secure the perimeter.  After that organisations like Oxfam could take over the administration and conscript the locals into press gangs to work on clean water pipelines, roads and sewer systems.  Foodbank and Action Against Hunger could launch raids on surrounding areas to seize food supplies, the Salvation Army could stand by with heavy weapon support in case of need and of course the Red Cross and Medecins sans Frontieres could take care of medical support and organ harvesting.  The RSPCA could provide trained attack dogs (and possibly lions) as an extra security measure.

And this is just the beginning.  Charities usually have tax exempt status.  It shouldn't be beyond the abilities of a capable lawyer to argue that any territories they control should be similarly exempt.  Multinational companies and the world's banking elite will flock to set up business in these "charitable enclaves".  This will provide an income stream a lot more certain than the rather fickle charitable donations most survive on now and will allow some serious forward planning.  Since "areas of need" cover about a third of the globe it won't be long before our newly empowered charities are a superpower in the making.

Naturally there is always the danger that things will go too far; that this new assertiveness will go to the charities heads.  We have enough difficulties dealing with rogue states.  Imagine what it's going to be like trying to deal with rogue charities.  It won't be long before they have clandestine WMD programmes and are sponsoring radical charities in other regions.  At this point the world (or what's left of it) will need to take action.  Various nations will huff and puff and of course the United Nations will say something that will probably be ignored or corrupted and wasn't of much use to begin with.  Ultimately of course, no matter how we try and avoid it, we will probably have to get the United States to invade the charities during the course of which most of the area will be burnt to the ground.  Possibly we can claim it as an anti cholera measure.

Full Metal Dressing Gown

Well after a day or two of seasonably warm weather it has snapped back to being chilly and rainy.  I'm delighted, it means I can sit here in my fluffy dressing gown all snuggly and warm.  The other people in the cafe are looking at me strangely but that's a small price to pay.

Isn't it odd that the most comfortable clothes one can buy tend to be those we never wear outside the house?  Women, of course, are the main sufferers in this regard but even men tend to dress a little less comfortably when they go out.  I suspect that the cause can be found in our dim and distant history.  Traditionally clothes were worn for protection, from the elements, the prying eyes of men or, in extreme cases, from swords and arrows.  With protection the main rationale comfort naturally took second place.

Once inaugurated ideas are incredibly hard to kill, even today comfort seems to be the last thing on most clothing designers minds.  The one exception to this is when comfort is the only criterion and in those cases the results are clothes that even I would hesitate to wear out of doors.  I wonder how many clothing designers realise that they are the direct heirs of armour makers?  Which of course leads to the question of which designer will be the first to send a model down the runway clad in a quarter of a ton of exquisitely made steel?  Don't laugh, it will happen.

Once it does we will have come full circle.  Mass production clothing chains will jump on the band wagon (knocking out cheap copies made with inferior steel of course) until everybody is clattering around like a garbage bin rolling down a flight of stairs.  Eventually sloppy versions will be created for us to wear indoors and we won't have any comfortable clothes at all.  I would develop this theme further but I have to polish and rust proof my slippers.

Sport as a Substitute for Doing Something Else

Well the rugby world cup has come to an end.  I am reliably informed that New Zealand won.  Good for New Zealand, if Australia couldn't win (and it seems that they couldn't) then I'm glad somebody else did.  Otherwise all the players would just be standing around looking stupid.  I'm a little disappointed that Georgia didn't do quite enough to get over the line but there's always next time, assuming the Russians have left any of it around by then.  Somebody has to win these things otherwise, what's the point?  There would be no reason to do a haka for starters.

The Maori haka is awesome when the performers follow it up by risking life and limb on the football field.  I doubt if it would have quite the same resonance if done by New Zealand's synchronised swimming team.  Without football a haka is just a folk dancing exhibition with all that implies in the way of sad, pathetic datelessness.  I was deeply disappointed to see a number of letters and articles in the newspaper (a real one, not the free one I get each afternoon) complaining about the haka.  Apparently these people felt that such a dance with its ritual challenge, aggressive posturing and throat slitting gestures was not quite the sort of thing we should have before thirty powerful, muscular men run onto a field, charge head first at their opponents and try and trample each other into the dirt.  Possibly they would like to have Chilean flute music as a lead in to the rugby instead.

What is it about sport?  Why do we get so excited about it (I'm using the special form of we which means "not me" by the way)?  The "sport as a substitute for war" line is just too tired and self evidently incorrect to have any resonance.  If sport is a substitute for war why do we still have wars?  How many wars have been interrupted so that people can play some sport?  War as a substitute for sport is a little more plausible although it does tend to imply that World War I started because the Austrians and Serbians turned up on a field only to discover that nobody had remembered to bring a soccer ball.

No, the rationale for sport is slightly different.  Sport plugs into three very strong and basic human desires; the desire to associate with other humans, the desire to beat up other humans and the desire of the vast majority to sit on their backsides drinking beer while they watch representatives from the first two do their thing.  I think the last desire is the most powerful.  This is why spectators have to pay to watch while the players actually get paid for turning up at all.

So back to the rugby, or rather, not.  Its over, New Zealand won. We have to wait another four years before the half dozen nations who actually play rugby will compete against each other and a dozen more nations who don't really play rugby but who essentially turn up to add a few extra flags at the venue and attempt to perpetuate the fantasy that rugby has even a fraction of the international appeal of soccer.  In the mean time there's always cricket.

They Don't Make Dictators Like They Used To

Two people who I hope were tourists were posing and taking photos of each other at Circular Quay railway station this afternoon.  I'm not sure why.  There are places on the station where you can stand and get a decent shot with the panorama of Sydney Harbour behind you and, best of all, very little of the actual station but these two weren't standing in any of them.  I can only assume they thought they would look better by comparison if they chose a background of grey, bleakly depressing ugliness.  Since one of them was wearing a shirt fashioned to look like an NYPD flak jacket and the other a shiny suit of metallic grey its possible they were right but probably not by much.

While we're touching on things of fashion, Muamar Qaddafi is dead.  We know he's dead because there are pictures of a rebel brandishing his gold plated pistol.  Do all these dictators have the same style consultant or what?  "OK, you've got the puppet legislature, a brutal secret police, your most corrupt cronies as ministers and a deeply demoralised army headed up by your drug addled son.  What else do you need to show that you have really made it in the dictator stakes?  You need something both brutal and tasteless; I've got it!  A gold plated gun."

What is it about absolute power that drives people to orgies of bad taste (as well as destruction and bloodshed of course)?  Louis XIV was just as big a tyrant and arguably less likeable than Qaddafi so how is it that Louis gave the world Versailles and all Qaddafi gave was a gold plated pistol and a crappy statue of a hand crushing an aeroplane?  Of course upbringing and education have something to do with it.  Upbringing and education can't give you taste if you possess none any more than birth can make you a gentleman however if you possess any natural inclination in that direction education and upbringing will help bring it out.

I don't think that can be the complete answer though.  Surely with a history as replete with bloody handed tyrants as ours we should be able to find one with some sense of taste if not class.  I strongly suspect that the answer lies in a feeling of insecurity.  I don't mean personal insecurity or insecurity of position; every dictator is rightly concerned about that and even Louis XIV wasn't famous for taking chances with his safety.  No, I mean psychological security.  Deep down inside every dictator knows he's just a thug who murdered or manipulated his way to the top of a very shaky pile.  The monstrous statues, the golden pistols, the staggering, tasteless excess all smack of the nouveau riche trying to out nob the nobs.

Versailles is staggering but it isn't tasteless and I suggest it isn't because Louis was utterly confident about his position.  Not about its permanence or the inability of others to take it away from him but the absolute, serene confidence of knowing that it is right and proper that he be where he is.  Louis was appointed by God and you don't get more legitimate than that.

The palace of Versailles is seen as a symbol of course.  A symbol of power, magnificence, of France's place in the world and Louis' place within France but perhaps it should better be seen as a symbol of confidence.  Louis had the place built because he wanted it.  Simple as that and because of who he was it never occurred to him that it might not happen.  Versailles certainly sent a message to the world and was intended to but it didn't reflect on Louis.  Versailles is a reflection of Louis.

And to be fair I suppose a golden pistol and a crappy statue is a pretty good reflection of Qaddafi.

You Want Me to do What, With What?

"I want my husband to use sock puppets as foreplay but he thinks it's weird and has started distancing himself from me".  Thus ran one woman's plaintive cry to the letters page of the free newspaper I unaccountably garner for myself every day.  A few questions come immediately to mind; does it have to be sock puppets or will any kind of marionette do?  Are you going to be tying the puppets up, slowly undressing them or simply throwing yourself on them with crazed abandon?  Do you really think anybody is going to stop laughing long enough to seriously address your problem?

Since idiotic advice is something I'm just as good at as the next person I will attempt to address this problem (between chuckles it must be admitted).  The first thing you can do is find out what weird or bizarre sexual fetish your husband possesses (don't worry there always is one) and offer a straight quid pro quo.  He does the sock puppet routine and you lie back on a pile of cushions and rub your self vigorously with a frozen chicken (to take an example chosen totally at random, I swear).  Alternatively get yourself some sexy high heeled boots to give him something to focus on while you're checking out the socks with buttons for eyes.

For the husband, get over it!  Sock puppets are pretty tame in the fetish stakes really.  At least she isn't asking you to urinate into her mouth (or vice versa).  Frankly sock puppets are harmless, inoffensive and make great toys for the kids once you've finished with them.  Indeed from the sounds of things you might not be having any kids without them.  Also, of course, you will never wonder what happens to those odd socks which "vanish" from the washing machine ever again.  Would you prefer it to be sock puppets or would you rather she asked you to dress up like somebody she would actually prefer to have sex with rather than you.  At least its difficult to get jealous of a sock puppet (although not impossible I'm prepared to bet).

For the final word on sock puppets let me take you to a strip club.  Or to be more accurate recount an occurrence that I witnessed on a (very rare, honestly) visit to one.  There was a pole dancer; she was attractive, athletic, naked and thus fulfilling most of the requirements for a pole dancer but the only reason why I remember her at all is this.  Half way through her routine when she was naked except for her boots she suddenly produced a pair of sock puppets and did a sock puppet dance routine to the theme tune from The Muppets.  Possibly the only time that music has been played in that particular establishment.  I can't say I was sexually aroused but it was the most thoroughly enjoyable strip tease routine I have ever seen.  She got laughs and applause without the spruikers having to remind the audience to take their hands out of their pockets.  Sock puppets rock!

When In Doubt, Make It Up

How can one predict the future?  Traditionally predicting the future seemed to involve killing something and examining the entrails.  This begs the question that if entrails are so good at predicting the future why didn't they warn the animal in question to stay away from the nutcase with the knife.  Others place their faith in spirit guides, as if the dead don't have anything better to do.  The spirit world must be pretty dull if the denizens have nothing else they'd rather be doing than providing advice for a bunch of lack witted, superstitious idiots.  I hope I don't wind up there when I die.  Although it must be admitted that the opportunities for a little malicious fun seem almost limitless.  But back to predicting the future, I personally can read palms, which is to say I was taught how to do it by someone who believed in that stuff.  I mention this occasionally, generally in the middle of some rant about the stupidity of fortune telling, and immediately find myself surrounded by people eagerly demanding that I tell their future.  If people insist on being that stupid it seems almost wrong not to charge them money for it.

Of course there is another form of fortune telling.  It consists of examining the likely consequences of possible actions and the likely responses of people to those actions.  This is colloquially known as using your common sense and despite the name it isn't very common.  I rather suspect that most people who go to a fortune teller already have a pretty good idea of what their future holds.  They don't go to the fortune teller to hear the future, they go there to hear something different.  I, for instance, have a reasonable idea of what my future holds and there is no way I would pay good money to hear something that boring and depressing recited back to me.  A lottery win and an affair with Scarlet Johansson would be the least I would expect.

So, how does one predict the future?  We can disembowel every animal on the planet without coming any nearer the truth and if the inhabitants of the spirit world are anything like me you would be insane to place any faith in them (although if you place faith in them you probably are insane).  Even the common sense option doesn't work as often as you might think due to the intervention of coincidence, chaos and the inherent refusal of most humans to do anything even remotely sensible.  So what to do?  Watch television is my answer although in deference to our new cyber age possibly I should extend that to communications media in general.  Watch them and try to pick out the hidden trends.  This will enable you to make educated guesses.  As an example; in Australia at the moment every second television advertisement is for life insurance.  Life insurance works on premiums being paid during the course of ones life in return for a lump payment on death.  Consider it saving for a rainy funeral.  Suddenly every financial institution in the country is hawking life insurance.  What does this tell us?  It tells me that it is increasingly likely that we're all going to live forever.  Good thing it wasn't an uneducated guess really.

Statues Are Useful Going Up and Coming Down

What does one have to do to get a statue carved of oneself?  In the old days it was easy, win a few battles and before you knew it half the sculptors and bronzesmiths in the country would be banging away.  Being royal helped, naturally and from time to time a lessor political luminary got the nod as well.

Let's be clear, I'm not talking about busts.  Anybody with an unemployed stonemason handy and some room on the mantelpiece can get a bust.  No, I'm talking about full on statues; life sized or greater with a plinth and quite possibly a horse thrown in for good measure (or possibly because they ordered too much bronze in the first place).  You really have to have impressed somebody to get a statue, either that or you possess sufficient wealth and power to impress yourself.  Statues are the way a grateful nation says "thank you" (or the way a ruthless dictator says "fuck you").

But let's go with "thank you".  I wonder how many statue recipients would happily have swapped immortality for the cost of the statue in ready cash?  Of course quite often statues are commissioned after the subject is dead.  This is a better option for a couple of reasons.  Firstly with the subject in the ground its unlikely they're going to turn up at the opening ceremony and announce that they would have preferred an index linked pension and a few more years with the grandkids.  Secondly with the object of veneration no longer around its less important if the statue doesn't really look like them.  To make doubly sure you can put the statue somewhere it's unlikely to attract close scrutiny.

The perfect example of this is Nelson's Column in London.  Sure, there's a statue of Nelson, at least they say its Nelson but since the thing is standing on top of a column over a hundred and sixty feet high who the hell knows, it might be anybody.  They probably just grabbed a one armed jockey, covered him in pigeon crap and used him as the model.  In fact how do we know there's even a statue there?  It might just be a vaguely Nelson shaped pile of pigeon droppings.

Yet we keep coming back to statues.  From the time of Nebuchadnezzar we have loved statues.  No dictator is so tinpot that there isn't at least one statue of him hanging around to be torn down by the infuriated rabble (or occasionally the US army) when his time comes.  In fact creating colossal statues of dictators can be considered a public service  What would happen if dictators simply settled for having their heads on stamps?  You'd feel pretty damn stupid attempting to demonstrate your hatred of the tyrant by ripping up a postage stamp in front of the news cameras.

You Should Really Be Able to See This One Coming

How much would you have to be paid before you would transport a human head from one city to another?  It's one of the perennial questions of course, its hardly possible to gather round the water cooler or go for a quiet drink with mates without the topic coming up.  Then you get into questions of distance, condition, preservatives (or lack of preservatives, ick) and more of the same.  One common thread was that we all agreed that we would be prepared to charge less if the employer was a university or medical facility and somewhat more if your employer was some guy named Antonio that you met in a tattoo parlour.  Oddly however there was much less danger of us simply pocketing the money and tossing the head in the bin if Antonio was picking up the bills.  And for good reason, he's repeat business.

Of course transporting human heads isn't for everyone and even those of us who do it have our own standards.  I, for one, refuse to transport any human head still attached to a body.  After all, what do you call someone who ferries complete human bodies around?  That's right, a taxi driver.  If I wanted to be a taxi driver I would emigrate to a country where I didn't know the language or the road rules.  I also refuse to transport more than one head at a time.  Some of my colleagues simply pack the heads in until their backseat looks like a clip from a Futurama episode but I like to think my customers appreciate the personal touch.

Naturally one hears the stories; of someone on their way to drop off a head and stopping for an impromptu football match.  I think that these tales can be safely relegated to the status of urban myth (and there is no way I was offside).  OK, perhaps Halloween isn't the best time to get a head delivered on time and undamaged but apart from that I can assure you that we are sensible, professional people who rarely interrupt their delivery schedule to go bowling.

Professionalism is the name of the game.  Sure there were some cowboys in the early days and I wouldn't like to guarantee that every head consigned back then reached its destination but times have changed.  I can confidently assure you that my colleagues and I have a business for heads.

And yes I did write this entire blog entry simply so I could make that lame arsed joke at the end.  If anybody expected better, I invite them to reread the last two hundred and thirty nine odd entries on this blog and adjust their opinion accordingly.

Saving Endangered Species, For Now

There is an Australian movie out at the moment called Red Dog.  The movie is about a red dog.  Some critics claim it can't be real Australian movie and have cited as proof  the fact that it doesn't make you want to kill yourself and it has been seen by more than seven people not directly connected with the production.  These are quite legitimate arguments but on balance it has to be admitted that the movie is probably Australian.

The most interesting thing about this movie is the sudden explosion in the popularity of red cattle dogs.  Apparently half the population of Australia have contacted their local pet shop to see about getting themselves one of these rusty companions.  Which is proof, if proof were needed, that people are really stupid.

Don't misunderstand me, the red cattle dog is a fine member of the canine community.  They're incredibly loyal, intelligent, affectionate, hard working and would make a great pet for anyone with a couple of kids and a large back yard.  If you live in an inner city apartment you would be better off with a goldfish.  Sure a goldfish won't fetch the paper but they're also less likely to crap on the rug.  At least not without taking a really deep breath first.  No, what I have a problem with is the human habit of latching on to something we see in the movies and deciding we can't live another moment without it.

In twelve months or so the animal shelters are going to be full of surplus to requirements red cattle dogs.  Yet that initial urge to possess is a powerful one indeed and like any normal human I have come up with a way to turn it to advantage.  There is nothing new about this of course, advertising agencies have operated on the same principle (possibly a poor choice of words) for decades.  However advertisers have a problem.  While product placement in movies is very useful the audience is at least vaguely aware that they are being marketed to and this dulls the message.  Sales go up but manufacturers are unlikely to see a rise of red cattle dog proportions.  At least they won't until somebody comes up with a funny, quirky yet heartwarming tale where the lead character is a can of coke.

So what could get the lead role in such a movie?  Two obvious answers present themselves; children and animals.  Since the marketing and sale of children is, for the moment, illegal let's focus on option number two.  Red Dog is the perfect example of a marketing drive for red cattle dogs.  People who hadn't heard of red cattle dogs before this movie are now trampling kids in the stampede to the petshop.  There seems to be no reason why this shouldn't work with other animals as well.  Animal welfare groups could commission heart warming, feel good movies about whatever endangered species they're concerned about this week and create an explosion of well being towards said animal.

It is important to note that I don't intend that they should make documentaries on bears in cages or harpooned whales.  That sort of thing may preach very well to the converted but it just leaves most people depressed while at the same time revealing the activists for the hectoring wanna be dictators they really are.  What is needed is a movie that makes people feel really good and associates the animal in question with that feeling.  Happy Feet that idiotic cartoon about the tap dancing penguin got a little closer to the ideal but spoiled it by being too preachy.  Am I the only one who wondered how many humans were going to go hungry simply to preserve fish stocks for a penguin with St Vitus's Dance?  Also you may note that the observers drew entirely the wrong conclusion from the dancing penguin.  They saw it dance and assumed this was because of pressure on its feeding ground whereas the movie made it plain it was due to pre birth brain damage.  The message I took from Happy Feet is that people must starve so penguins can live and environmentalists are idiots.

No, what we need is movies like Red Dog or, going back a bit, Lassie and such like.  The sort of movie that has people walking out of the cinema empathising with the animal in question.  This outpouring of well wishing can be harnessed to create better conditions for the animal and make us all feel a bit better about ourselves.  A win win situation really.  Of course in a year or so our animal shelters are going to be full of okapi, siberian tigers and blue whales.  At that point, let's face it, we're probably going to kill them.